The news about Battlefront’s pseudo-sequel to their excellent Combat Mission World War Two games has been out for a while. It took me a little longer to decide if I was interested in it or not.

The time and place is Syria in the near future. The US intervenes when a new and threatening dictator topples the Assad government and war erupts. Battlefront says that it wants to make a game about asymmetrical warfare – a major change of pace from the my tank versus your tank battles of the WWII games. Combat Mission: Shock Force will not be Operation Iraqi Freedom redux since the Syrians will have some sort of comventional capability.

The setting doesn’t bother me that much. Though many people would have preferred a hypothetical Cold War conflict, Bruce Geryk notes that a robust editor and a good equipment list means that we will likely see modders make a US/Soviet battle before too long. You could also get a lot of Arab-Israeli conflict stuff done, I suspect.

My major concern is the whole “asymmetric warfare” angle. Battlefront says that they don’t want a US “turkey shoot” but let’s face it – today’s US Army can go toe-to-toe with any other army on earth and do better than fine. Put them up against a second-rate army like Syria and it will be over before it starts. Air power wasn’t modelled all that well in the Combat Mission games, but it’s absurd to have an opening premise in 2007 that the hills and deserts of Syria will have enemy tanks on them for very long. That leaves guerrilla strikes, gunmen popping out of houses, IEDs, house-to-house searches…Not a lot of fun. They say that urban warfare and rough terrain will be the focus, which means a lot more infantry and less armor.

The idea of a story driven campaign is more interesting since they’ve never tried this. I know that in Combat Mission I almost always generate a random scenario. Stringing battles together with rough plot points can’t make for a really compelling story. Will losses carry over from one battle to the next? Will soldiers get experience? Will there be poorly acted cutscenes?

More opinions to come as more news becomes known.

You can find my complete review over at VGPub here. My first big word of warning is in the second paragraph.

“Familiarity doesn’t quite breed contempt, but is does take away a lot of the excitement. Considering that the game is set in the Age of Discovery, you might expect to see some strange new worlds. Instead, it’s almost as if Columbus sailed the Atlantic and found everything pretty much as he expected.”

I still give AoE 3 a very high score (8.5) because I would be lying if I said I wasn’t having a lot of fun playing it. Like some people, I am alternately bewildered and enthralled by the game, but hours spent are hours spent. AoE 3 has won me over despite all the objective complaints you can raise about its originality, lack of options and even backward trajectory in some respects.

Judging from the chat rooms in these early days though, there could be some trouble with the hardcore crowd. The lack of formations has some people really upset. More than once I’ve seen people type “I’m going back to AoK” – which is just silly since there are at least a dozen better RTS games out there now.

People who love Age of Kings should be happy with AoE 3 in many respects. It has a simple rock-paper-scissors mentality, the factions are mostly the same with some cosmetic differences, you can build town centers wherever you like…this game is a retreat from the brilliant stab at innovation that Age of Mythology was.

But Ensemble has made an excellent game in spite of themselves. The early game has a nice rush to it as you scurry to get the resources necessary to Age-up to a point where you can defend yourself and kill your enemies. Early fortifications are cheap but effective, so you can lag behind just a little bit and still make a go of it.

But the campaign…ouch. I sort of enjoyed the campaign in Age of Mythology. It wandered the globe, gave you a chance to play all the cultures and had a relatively interesting story about a possible revolt against the gods. The AoE 3 one has terrible voice acting, a hokey plot about the Fountain of Youth and it is never really clear why you are playing the British in one scene and the Germans in the next. It is a very long campaign with a few very difficult missions. A couple of times I had to reduce the difficulty to easy just so I could get on with the nonsense. I always wonder what kind of people play these things, but then again, I always play the story campaigns myself.

I recommend Age of Empires III not because it is great but because it is very good. These are masters at work and the game demonstrates just what money and experience can provide.

Mad Doc Software has announced that they will develop an expansion for Empire Earth II.

Of course they will. When PCGamer gives you a 94% and tells everyone that it is one of the best RTS ever, how can you not?

Empire Earth II: The Art of Supremacy (another terrible name full of the usual strategy game cliches) will have three new campaigns (does anybody buy a RTS for the campaigns?), new civilizations (French, Russian, Zulu and Masai) and “native tribes” to join or assimilate.

I wasn’t all that impressed with EE2. It was an average game at best and seemed to miss all that has happened in RTS since the original Empire Earth.

The funny thing is that Age of Empires III (review forthcoming) has many of the same issues but is a much better game. It certainly helps that the Age games have had a clearer temporal focus, but it also demonstrates that excellent designers can still mine value out of the exhausted veins of historical RTS if they have the sense of style and panache that Ensemble does. Both games have the feeling that they have been hiding in caves since Age of Kings. Whatever lessons EE2 draws from Rise of Nations or Age of Mythology it bungles. AoE 3 mostly pretends that none of that stuff ever happened and casts aside some of the improvements it had already made to the formula.

As you can guess, I am not exactly excited about an expansion pack for EE2. Despite the respectable reviews in the press, it hasn’t survived as a buzzworthy topic. The gaming afficianadoes that I talk to are still more interested in Warcraft 3 or Act of War than the gray world of EE2.

I’ll wait for the reviews from people I trust before picking it up but even then I might not bother. A good expansion can make a decent game great. I’ve never seen one really make me care about something I’d almost forgotten.

Age of Empires III

After a long hiatus, DIY Games is up and running again. The site’s fearless leader has a picture of his exploding car on the site and that sort of sums up what kind of year he’s been having.

I will be returning to work with DIY, partially out of loyalty to Greg – he took a chance on me and it’s worked out pretty well for both of us. Mostly because it is a nice conduit into the indie community. Also, I like the atmosphere there quite a bit. The staff has expanded some, and since Jozef Purdes will be back with his excellent indie adventure game column, I see no reason to stop associating myself with such an interesting feature.

Eventually I will have to cut back my pro bono work – time is getting too precious. But DIY will be the last place I cut. Hope you can follow us to the head of the indie website pack.

After a few months of interrupted life, DIY Games is back in business with my review of Lux.

The review really says it all. Part of my reluctant thumbs up is because Lux is a flashy Risk clone and not much more. The price is decent, but for 25 bucks I want a little more than the old Parker Brothers classic with an editor. The fact that AI is unable to even play the game well shortens its life even more.

So why 3 stars instead of 2? Well, it is the best Risk clone out there. The multiplayer game brings back those Saturday afternoons you would play Risk with your friends and brothers – at least before you discovered video games. Or girls.

Mostly video games.